In many minds, however, this season is associated with melancholy images, but they are such as bring pleasure, rather than pain. Who that has read the following lines, descriptive of the close of autumn, has not felt their soothing influence? The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds and naked woods and meadows brown and sear. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the withered leaves lie dead, They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s tread,―― The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow, through all the gloomy day. Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprung and stood, In brighter light and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood? Alas! they all are in their graves――the gentle race of flowers Are lying in their lowly beds with the fair and good of ours; The rain is falling where they lie――but the cold November rain Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again. THE REVOLUTIONS OF THE EARTH. Thus I have given you a somewhat poetical view of the four seasons; and by what contrivance do you imagine that so much beauty, comfort and happiness are brought about? It is by mechanism, more ingenious, more wonderful than all the contrivances of man. I will try to make you understand this. Let it be remembered that the sun is firmly stationed in the centre of a vast circle, called the earth’s orbit. The earth continues to whirl along in this orbit, going entirely round the sun once every year. It is kept in motion very much as a boy whirls an apple tied to a string around his head; as the apple cannot fly away from the boy on account of the string, so the earth cannot fly away from the sun on account of the attraction between the two, which operates as a string to tie the earth to the sun and keep it in its orbit. Well; now imagine the earth moving around the sun once every year. But you must recollect that the earth is also whirling round every twenty-four hours upon its own axis, and this axis runs north and south. One end of the axis is called the north pole, and points always to the north; the other is called the south pole, and always points to the south. But it so happens, that at one time, this axis inclines more to the sun than it does at another. When the north pole is inclined towards the sun, the rays will fall more directly on the northern portions of the earth. This will cause summer at the north and winter at the south. And when the south pole is inclined towards the sun, it is summer at the south, and winter at the north. Thus you see the rotation of the sun on its own axis every twenty-four hours produces day and night; and the annual movement of the earth around the sun, with the different inclinations of its axis to the sun, produces the wonderful changes of the seasons, which we have noticed.